In New Mexico, a homegrown wilderness bill makes
headway

In the face of the Interior
Department’s top-down decision to stop looking for new
wilderness areas on federal land, some communities are working to
protect wilderness from the bottom up. Sidestepping White
House-appointed bureaucrats, wilderness advocates are working with
their elected representatives in Congress.

Last June, the
Coalition for New Mexico Wilderness — a group of over 375
businesses and local environmental organizations — along with
Zia Pueblo, gave the New Mexico congressional delegation a proposal
to preserve a rugged patch of northwest New Mexico, Ojito, as
wilderness. The proposed bill would also sell federal land
surrounding Ojito to Zia, whose people have lived nearby for almost
800 years.

In September, four of the
state’s five legislators — New Mexico Reps. Tom Udall,
D, and Heather Wilson, R, and Sens. Jeff Bingaman, D, and Pete
Domenici, R — sponsored the Ojito Wilderness Bill in
Congress. The bill would protect almost 25,000 acres, half of it as
wilderness. Congress has yet to take action on the bill, but
proponents are optimistic that it will pass in 2004.

"We’re going back to the basics: Build strong public support
(for wilderness designations)," says Jim Scarantino, executive
director of the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. "We don’t
rely on some bureaucrat to give us wilderness or take it
away."

Give and take

A land of curvy
hoodoos and badlands, Ojito has been a wilderness study area since
1991. At that time, Manuel Lujan Jr., Interior secretary under
George H.W. Bush and a veteran Republican congressman from New
Mexico, recommended it for wilderness protection. He sent a
proposal to Congress, but lawmakers never got around to passing the
bill. For the past 12 years, the rough terrain has been in limbo,
with temporary protection as a study area.

Ojito might
have remained in limbo if not for the 807-member Zia Pueblo, the
source of the New Mexican flag’s red-on-yellow sun. For over
a decade, Zia Pueblo has been trying to bridge two sections of its
reservation with a parcel of Bureau of Land Management land that
includes the proposed wilderness. The area contains pottery made by
the pueblo’s ancestors, as well as places to dig clay to make
new pottery.

The BLM and at least one environmental group,
the New Mexico Native Plant Society, had opposed Zia’s
effort, fearing that the pueblo might lock the public out. A
December 2002 letter from the BLM expressed the agency’s
"long-standing position" against transferring federal land to the
pueblo, saying the action would not serve the "national interest"
as required by the Federal Land Policy and Management Act.

But about three years ago, the pueblo reached out to
wilderness advocates to fashion a compromise, which has won over at
least one critic — the Native Plant Society. "I think that
many people within the federal government were surprised that the
environmental groups and the pueblo were able to work this out,"
says Peter Pino, an administrator for Zia. "They thought we would
butt heads and never come together."

A BLM spokesperson
declined to comment on the legislation, but at a county commission
meeting last year, an agency employee sounded the only objection to
the Ojito bill — specifically to the sale of public land to
the pueblo. More recently, the Albuquerque Wildlife Federation, a
hunting and conservation group, has also opposed that provision.
The group’s president, Richard Becker, says he’s
concerned the bill will "take that (land) out of the public domain
and the potential use for hunters."

The bill would allow
Zia to buy about 12,500 acres for the land’s market price, in
return for the pueblo’s promise to leave it undeveloped and
open to the public. To guarantee those restrictions, Zia agreed to
waive its sovereign immunity from lawsuits. Some pueblo members
initially opposed the provisions, Pino says, "but they realized
that if this is going to happen, they’re going to have to
make that concession."

The agreement has won support not
only from the congressional delegation, but also from Gov. Bill
Richardson, the county commissions of Sandoval County and
neighboring Bernalillo County, the New Mexico commissioner of
Public Lands, and a legion of American Indian and environmental
groups. Sandoval County Commissioner Daymon Ely says, "From a local
point of view, (in a county) where you have lots of controversy
over wilderness issues, this was an exception to the
rule."

Supporters hope the bill’s bipartisan support
will carry it through a congressional committee hearing early this
year, and on to a vote. "The neat thing about Ojito," says
NMWA’s Scarantino, "is that here, in the face of a White
House that is not pro-wilderness, the citizens of New Mexico made
the system work for them. That’s the genius of the Wilderness
Act."